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Category: cookies

I am a lover of all kinds of chocolate chip cookies. Except Chewy Chips Ahoy. No way, man. I ADORE Tate’s Chocolate Chip Cookies, they are insanely delicious. I also really like the Ghirardelli chocolate chip cookie recipe (which I waxed poetic about in another post). Uplifters Kitchen in Santa Monica has a MEAN salted pecan chocolate chip cookie. And my friend’s mom makes THE BEST oatmeal chocolate chip cookies ON EARTH. And don’t forget Double Tree’s chocolate chip cookies! How do they do it?! I could eat an entire warehouse full of those. Yummy, yummy, yummy, I’ve got love in my tummy.

These cookies have a mildly interesting story. I didn’t even set out to make chewy chocolate chip cookies. Au contraire, I set out to make thin and crispy chocolate chip cookies a la Tate’s. I made the official Tate’s recipe a while back and they were extraordinarily underwhelming and absolutely nothing like Tate’s cookies. One could chalk this up to faulty measuring (or whatever) on my part, but I also read many reviews that agreed with the fact that the recipe yielded cookies that were quite unlike the real thing. It’s just as well. If we could make them ourselves, we wouldn’t buy them.

So then I came upon Alexis Stewart’s thin and crispy chocolate chip cookie recipe, which had a picture that looked exactamundo like Tate’s. Not only are our names kind of similar, she is also the daughter of Martha Stewart, so it’s like impossible for those genes to do wrong, right? And pictures never lie! So of course I had to try it. FAIL. AGAIN. I could still chalk this up to mistakes on my part, but I still wanted to try a different recipe that got me the results I was looking for.

So I found a third recipe and as I was perusing the ingredients I saw something CRAZY. The recipe did not call for any eggs! Indignant, I made the recipe with an egg included. Well, the cookies were not crispy AGAIN. I can’t blame the recipe of course, because I essentially did not follow it, but the cookies were ABSOLUTELY BRILLIANT. I couldn’t believe it. They had so much flavor, they were chewy, they were buttery and had the perfect amount of chocolate. They were scrumptious. Even the next day the texture was almost exactly the same and the taste was just perfect.

There are a couple unusual things about this recipe. 1) One of the ingredients is WATER. What! I think that was supposed to replace the egg but I added it anyway. 2) The cookies are baked at a mere 300 degrees F for around 18 minutes! So odd. But so so so good. And the final flavor secret here is that I refrigerated the dough for about 3 hours. MMMMM. Even when I was looking at the pictures while writing this post my mouth started watering.